What the World Demands of You: The Millions Interviews Margo Jefferson

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I meet Margo Jefferson for breakfast at her hotel in Boulder, Colorado, where she’s speaking at a literary conference. She’s energetic in both her speech and movement, gesturing, reaching, illustrating with her hands—artifacts, I think, of her years immersed in theatre, where her criticism earned her a Pulitzer.

After our interview, I watched her at various panels during the conference and even in the face of confusing questions, she was smiling, gracious, witty as she discussed her upbringing and Negroland, her 2015 memoir of life in 1950s and 1960s America within upper-class black society.

We spoke about that book, its implications within today’s political context, her advice for young women of color, and what she’s working on now.

The Millions: Negroland is a cultural memoir. I had the feeling in reading it that you’re quite strategic in the places and times that you show us your emotions and motivations versus the times that you present yourself quite objectively, even clinically. How did you go about making these choices?

Margo Jefferson: It was a big breakthrough for me working on it, when I realized that certain ways in which I was brought up—always presenting a certain strategically composed self—and the fact that these things were sometimes competing, and sometimes collaborating. I had to both write about it and embed those contradictions in the writing.

Also, I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political.

Third, I’d been brought up in the world of Negroland, a world where you might have to switch persona at any moment, depending, for example, on what my mother’s needs were, here’s what Betty Anne down the street needs, here’s what my teacher needs. In this situation, I have to confess to a certain awareness, a certain kind of knowledge. In this [other] situation, I have to play innocent. That’s theatrical, but that’s also psychological and factually accurate, this constant construction of different performing selves. Those were my guidelines.

And there was also a kind of raw emotional drive–I really did find that I couldn’t get at certain of the passages when I was in high school until I put them in the third person and I thought that once I did that, I could rewrite it in first person, but then looking at it on paper, I realized that it could work the way it was because adolescence is such a peculiar and isolated story. It’s almost fantastical, getting through adolescence!

TM: Yes, it seems that you were playing around not only with form, but also with perspective and point of view.

MJ: That was really interesting to me. I thought, if I’m trying a new form, then let me try strategies and devices as a writer that I haven’t before. I wanted dialogue, I wanted scenes, I wanted confessions, I wanted lists. So, it had to be more collaged in terms of form, style, strategy.

TM: You had a habit in your book of stating your intentions. At various points, you write, “let’s unpack this,” “I’m going to change my tone now,” “I’m going to begin in a quiet, clinical way.” What was the reasoning behind this?

MJ: Yes, it was deliberately disruptive, almost like a placard. I believe that began when I wrote the introduction, when I said “I was raised not to do certain things”—essentially, not to write memoir. That was a huge breakthrough for me because I was giving myself license to write, to struggle, with this writing. And those announcements were a kind of externalization of those little “clicks” where I had to re-adapt my persona in real life as the situation changed, as who I was with changed. I liked them as a theatrical device, too—you interrupt the dramatic action with an alienation effect.

TM: You wrote, “white people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They failed just as often. They failed more often.” That’s a really interesting statement in today’s political context. Do you think those competitive urges among white people—for everyone in society to live up to the ideals of whiteness while making sure that non-white people did not outdo whites—played out in the 2016 elections?

MJ: The Obamas embodied the dreams of minorities and everything that was impressive and traditionally thought of as white, but they showed it could also be acquired by black people. When Obama was at his best, he signaled that those ideals were not purely white. The best of Obama came in part from intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois—there were black and “third-world” intellectual and cultural and political traditions informing him. To see how those combined with “Western training”—that was impressive. But many of us knew there would be punishment—“there will be blood,” as the saying goes!

TM: When you appeared in the Still Processing podcast a few days after the 2016 elections, you pointed out that you and Hillary Clinton were born in the same year and that you both had to make yourself into “serious” women. How do you think those processes differed for the two of you?

MJ: For one thing, I became a writer; I got involved with the arts, and that demands in some way—even from a critic—a certain expressivity. Even as a little girl, I wanted to be a pianist, then I wanted to be an actress—I think all of that kicks in. I was fortunate that I didn’t enter politics in that mood of the sixties and seventies—anti-war, Black Power, civil war, feminism, gay rights—because I could act up and act out more. And Hillary has said that she wished that more of the “cracks,” vulnerabilities—or even if they’re not vulnerabilities—she wishes that she’d behaved less… “properly.” You know, it’s inhuman when Donald Trump is moving around behind you, prowling. If you just pretend it’s not inhuman, to people watching, that registers as mechanistic, as not to be believed and that gets converted to not to be trusted.

TM: There’s one part of the book when you’re in college and you object to play a maid in a theatre production, but eventually you gave into your desire to be onstage and eagerness to not appear as touchy. I think a lot of women, especially women of color, struggle with such choices: taking steps to realizing their artistic ambitions combined with the reluctance not to appear to touchy, versus some level of humiliation, whether that’s a stereotypical casting, or tokenism. What have you learned since your college days about making these kinds of choices?

MJ: This is what I remember so gratefully from the early days of the women’s movement—first, feminism and then black feminism—is finding or forming a band of women you trust, who have the same basic principles, beliefs and passions, or at least whose passions overlap. The personal is political and the political manifests itself in the personal. Women need to talk, confide, confess, and strategize. Of course, you’re always going to struggle it out with yourself but you can’t always get it right alone. To know that there’s a community, that you’ve got your constituency—that has been a huge help to me.

TM: You write that “starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence,” you had to break the self that existed prior into pieces. What did that process and the end result mean to you?

MJ: By the time I graduated college, I became aware that “inner consequence” meant really living to act out my deepest passion and needs, but it also meant to meet the demands of this broiling, bracketing society we were living in with black people, women of color, gay people. And I would add with anti-war and environmental concerns. You know, I wasn’t suited for that; I wasn’t prepared for it. My parents were honorable and they did care about my sister and I having “good characters,” but that was still within the framework of being ladies and behaving well. And that was where bringing a critical lens in the book was useful—I could openly critique my own acts of snobbery, for example, when I told my friend who’s a working-class girl that she should shave her legs. A person of inner consequence—it’s the alignment of your own desires and needs with what you feel the world demands of you, and should demand of you, as opposed to what it shouldn’t—it’s being able to make that distinction: What’s the world asking of me, what is my job asking of me, what is the person I’m dating asking of me that is wrong, that shouldn’t be asked? How will I find the right ways to respond? Getting to that place is a long process but it does seem to me that many of the young women I meet are much bolder than I was at their age, and that’s heartening.

TM: You take a lot of care in protecting people you mention in this book, including some childhood friends and your parents. The responsibility of essayists and memoirists to those they write about is hotly debated. How did you come up with guidelines for yourself on this?

MJ: I just kept thinking and feeling my way through it. I also have a couple of close friends who’ve written memoir. You also look at your own responses to the memoirs you’ve read—what do you admire about the boldness, the violation of so-called codes of behavior? What are the consequences within your world of people? You think through all that and you weigh it against what you’ve got to say. My father was already dead. My mother died before the book came out—I think she would have had mixed feelings but been proud. My sister was very helpful and I wasn’t worried about her reaction but she also died before the book came out. I had to be more careful with friends and peers I wrote about. My protection was largely by not using their names. I believe I said their stories are mine but their names are theirs. But still, I did get some harsh letters from people that I didn’t expect, and some chilly silences.

TM: Your memoir came out in 2015. Would you have changed or added anything if you’d written it or if it had come out after the 2016 elections?

MJ: Claudia Rankine brought up the same lines you did about white people’s efforts and failures at being white, and she said, “Oh, I wish you’d developed that more!” So that certainly would have deserved to be pushed. And in many ways, performatively, Trump is such a clown, such a type of what would’ve been called “the black minstrel,” the buffoon, the boaster. I think I would’ve done a whole portrait of that. It’s very much a minstrel show—his greedy children, parading—and I would have talked more about the below-the-surface resentments and competitiveness.

I also might have talked more about biracial black people. It was easier for my generation—not necessarily psychologically for mixed-race people—but politics and sociology simply said you were black if you were mixed race. Obama fell into the old world of that by identifying as black, yet he talked about his white parent. But there was never any discourse in journalism or politics that said he is our first biracial president—what does that mean? When I wrote about Meghan Markle for The Guardian, I deliberately called her “black and biracial”—I always kept those phrases together.

TM: In that article for The Guardian about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding, you wrote that Meghan could be considered as “marrying up,” but so could Harry: He was marrying into “all the possibilities of postmodernity.” Can you speak more about that? What do those possibilities look like?

MJ: On the most superficial level—we start always at the most superficial!—this man is gaining access to glamor, excitement, styles of being in the world. Serena Williams was at the wedding, Oprah was at the wedding! He’s meeting all these fascinating cultural figures. His involvement with Africa is taking on a kind of honorableness as opposed to looking like just a kind of white-boy dabbling. He’s entering new lines of aristocracy as well as political dynasty. He’s saved from being a relic. Choosing Meghan and choosing the world that she has access to takes him out of the museum of the royals. It bestows a kind of daring on him. It’s almost like someone who’s been in a sitcom or a drama comedy playing the same role all their lives and they get a chance to stretch, they get another script, they get to act in ways they haven’t before, they get to show other aspects of their character.

TM: I felt a lot of solidarity in your descriptions of your family as “third race”—not white, not stereotypically black—and I imagine a lot of other non-black women of color felt the same sense of solidarity. Is this something you anticipated when you wrote the book?

MJ: I noticed in England a lot of South Asians would say that to me and in America, a number of East Asians have said that to me. I didn’t anticipate it, but from teaching and from readings I’d assigned, I sensed that this possibility existed. And I was really pleased, it made me really happy to get those reactions. The racial conversation in America at this point is too centered on white and black. That would’ve been another interesting thing to take on if the book were coming out now. If you say today that Trump is a racist, you have to consider at least as much the implications for Mexicans and Muslims as for black people. How does that affect relations—which are sometimes competitive—between people of color? I think that’s fascinating.

TM: It is, very much so. As a last question, what are you working on these days?

MJ: I’m working on a new book; I just signed the contract for it. It’s again going to be a combination of memoir and cultural criticism but more experimental—it won’t a Volume 2 of Negroland. It will explore, for example, my encounters with political, cultural, social situations through an aesthetic text. I’ll be writing more about the female and the black female body as experienced through someone like Ella Fitzgerald, or the Tennessee Tiger Bells who were sort of forbearers of Serena except they were totally genteel and gentrified. There was a tone of anxiety hovering over them that hovers over Caster Semenya, the black South African runner that the Olympic committee found to have “higher estrogen,” that sense of “are they men? Are they women?”

Essentially, the book will be centered on cultural objects, fetishes, passions, obsessions tied to memoir, but also read on their own.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott offers a number of definitions for criticism in his new book, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. In one early chapter, he describes it as a process of “loving demystification.” Elsewhere he writes, “It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.” Later, he adds the highly distilled, harder-than-it-sounds dictum: “[D]escribe what you see; tell us if it’s any good.”

In a sense, the whole book is one big, provocative, often funny definition of criticism that hops from Rainer Maria Rilke to Chuck Berry to Teju Cole’s novel Open City to Yelp to countless other thinkers and cultural artifacts. (The book’s index, from “Abramović, Marina” to “Zuckerberg, Mark,” is six and a half pages long.)

Scott pulls from an array of genres to complete the task. On some pages, the book is a philosophical treatise asking big questions like, “How do we know what we know? Why do we feel what we feel?” On others, we ride shotgun inside his mind as he walks through the Louvre, pondering all of the layers of the place’s meaning. Interspersed with these chapters are self-interviews that read like modern Platonic dialogues seasoned with bits of memoir and odes to Pixar films. And, by book’s end, aspiring critics even find a bit of how-to wisdom. “To resort to the supremely empty word ‘compelling,’” Scott writes in a memorable anti-adjective riff, “is to confess that you have nothing to say.”

In short, Better Living is a book you should read if you want to feel like you’re talking about art and ideas with a low-key, yet scary-smart, guy who seems to have heard every record, read every book, pondered every painting, and seen every movie ever released. And The Millions did just that, last week, when we spoke with Scott over the phone.

TM: I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit, because I remember — and I went back and checked the time, it was 10 years ago — you wrote a piece about novels in The Times that ended with a note that said, “He is writing a book on the American novel since World War II.” I don’t want to bring up a sore spot but…

AOS: No, it’s fine. [Laughing]

TM: Is that book still in the works?

AOS: Uh, no. Before I started working at The Times, I was a book critic. And I kind of had this very grand idea, because no one had done it; no one had written, I thought, written a kind of big, sweeping, synthetic, critical, popular book about the American novel after the Second World War. So, being kind of young and arrogant and stupid, I thought I could do it.

And I was working on the proposal and getting it ready, and then I got this job at The Times, sort of by surprise. And being young and arrogant and stupid, I figured, “Oh, no problem. I can be a film critic in the morning and write the definitive history of the American novel since World War II in the afternoon.” And it didn’t really work out. I sort of kept at it, as much as I could, for as long as I could, but at a certain point I had to put it aside. And the publisher was very, very patient for a long time, and then, at a certain point, they were just like, “Look, this is probably not going to happen.” So I’ve moved on from that. But for a long time, yes, it was in my bio and you’re not the first or the last person to ask, “Hey, what about that book?”

TM: I don’t mean to be That Guy who says, “How’s that book coming along?” But, thankfully, we have a great new book we can talk about. And my first question is kind of a loaded question, given what you do and the subject of this book: have you been reading the reviews?

AOS: I’ve been reading all of the reviews. I sort of made a vow that it would be very hypocritical of me to avoid the reviews. I’ve been dishing it out for 20 years or more, in various ways, so I’d better be able to take it. And I have to say I have really enjoyed reading the reviews, including the less glowing reviews. I mean, it’s very nice to read a review like Michael Wood’s that appeared in The New York Times, which I was not tipped off about. It was great to read that in the paper.

But it’s also been really interesting to me to read some of the other, less glowing ones. Because I find that this is a book that — it’s about criticism, so I was hoping all along, in a way, that critics would have something to say about it. And I kind of suspected that a number of them — because we all do it in our own different ways, and have different ideas about how it should be done — that a lot of my colleagues would take issue with it.

TM: Let’s go back to the beginning. Why write this book?

AOS: Well, I’d been thinking about it for a long time, obviously. It’s in my nature to reflect on what I do. And over the years, I’ve written a couple pieces — as I think a lot of critics do — every once in a while, you’ll write an essay either defending what you do from people who complain about critics or trying to explain what critics do, or, as often is the case, complaining about other critics and how they do it wrong. But I hadn’t really thought about it comprehensively.

[And] I think what sparked it was there was a moment around 2010, 2011, which I think was one of many moments of kind of digital triumphalism, where print was collapsing, newspapers were going under right and left, and there was all of this cool stuff coming up. Social media was really on the rise and there were all of these powerful algorithms and there were sites like Yelp and there were Amazon reviews and there was user-generated content. And there was Twitter. And there was Facebook. And there was a certain amount being written and said about, “Well, this means that we don’t needs critics. Critics are finally obsolete. We don’t need people from ivory towers bossing us around and telling us what to like. We’re all just going to like what we like and we’ll hit the ‘Like’ button and share it with our friends. And we’ll do our own thing. We’ll be our own critics.”

And I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting.” I wondered if that was true. I thought, “Well, am I the last of the breed on my way out? Is this thing that I’ve enjoyed doing so much, that’s sort of been my vocation and my job — is that over?” So I kind of sat down to try to think about that and to try to think about it in as unprejudiced way as I could. Not to be just defensive and not say, “Oh, all you people on the Internet are…idiots. Who gave you the right to have these opinions?”

I didn’t want to just be defending my job and its prerogatives. But I wanted to explain, first of all to myself, what criticism was. Where does it come from? Why does it exist? Why do people do it? How is it a job? How is it something other than a job? How is it something that exists independently of the careers and professions of people like me?

TM: And then Samuel L. Jackson picked a fight with you.

AOS: [Laughs.] Yeah, that was pretty early. I had been working on this I guess for about a year. And it was a great gift. Because one of the things I’d been thinking about was why people seem to hate critics so much. Because you hear it a lot, if you review stuff, whatever you review, people get mad at you and people want you to go away. And people think you’re ruining their fun or you’re just some kind of egghead spoilsport raining on everyone’s parade.

So I wrote a review of The Avengers. And it was actually not an entirely negative review, by any means. It was, I thought, very measured and balanced and fair. And I really like the cast of that movie a lot, including Samuel L. Jackson. But it was also…I was complaining about the blockbuster imperative and the way that all of these movies, that whatever talent or wit or intelligence or originality that they seem to have often seems kind of compromised by the need to make them these big tent pole, giant-sized-blockbuster, globally profitable movies. And Samuel L. Jackson went on Twitter and said, “Avengers fans, we need to find A.O. Scott a new job — one he can actually do.” Which I thought was very funny. Because, I’d been thinking about it, [while] researching and starting to write this book, “Well, what is my job? How does one actually do it?”

And so I tweeted something back and it turned into one of those little Twitter tempests. Which are always hilarious. For about 12 hours, everyone is obsessed about it. And entertainment writers are writing about it. “Oh! A.O. Scott and Samuel L. Jackson!” And then it sort of moves on and people forget about it.

Interestingly, he didn’t forget about it. He came back in an interview like six months later, in The Huffington Post to elaborate on his problems with me and my review and with how critics, in his view, don’t get movies like The Avengers. And that was very useful to me, too. That really gave me material to work with and kind of helped me to think about and to write about, “Well, what is the nature of the subject? What is the tension between fans and critics? Or between artists and critics? What is the problem with thinking hard about popular culture?”

TM: That strain of hating critics and the idea of “There have never been any statues erected for critics” is strong in our culture, and you talk about it in the book. But I can think of at least one person who bucked the trend, and I know he’s someone you knew, because you appeared in the documentary about him. And that was Roger Ebert, who was perhaps the most beloved critic our culture has seen. What did people love so much about him, do you think?

AOS: It’s fascinating how that happened. And I’m not sure he was always loved. I think he grew into that and the audience grew to appreciate him over the years. And I think it’s partly because Roger was both — and I don’t think any other critic, maybe, has done this quite as well — he was both an extremely sophisticated and intelligent and knowledgeable judge and analyst of movies. I mean, he knew more about film history, more about cinematic form, more about how movies work than whole faculties at film departments in universities. He could have taught any course on film at any university. And he sometimes did.

But he was also a thoroughly democratic — small “d” — person. He had this kind of Midwestern, populist, public-spirited ethic. He never left the Chicago Sun-Times. He certainly didn’t need that salary after his TV show took off. He could have gone to any newspaper or magazine in the country. But he stayed at the Sun-Times, which is a blue-collar paper in Chicago. And he wrote in very plain, accessible language. And he never condescended to readers. And he never dumbed down his ideas.

People know him from television. He was a wonderful television personality. But if you read his writing, you see the open-mindedness and the generosity of spirit and the humanism, the feeling like he’s a person talking to you. He saw this movie, you saw this movie, and you’re having a conversation about it. He embodied that idea of criticism, which for me is a very, very attractive and important one, better than anyone else.

And I think it’s interesting when you look back at the film critics of the past, there are certainly giant and important figures. People talk about Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris as certainly the big ones of the ’60s and ’70s. I think of that period of the later 20th century, he turned out to be the giant. He turned out to be the one who really figured how to write with maximum intelligence and literary acumen about this popular art form that everybody loves.

TM: I recently saw Werner Herzog’sEncounters at the End of the World, and he dedicated the movie to him! It’s like the inverse of your Samuel L. Jackson feud. It’s almost unimaginable.

TM: The title of your book suggests almost a kind of self-help impulse. How can criticism — either consuming it or producing it — make our lives better?

AOS: There is a self-help component. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, obviously. But not entirely. And I think that what I’m arguing for, what I’m arguing that criticism provides or that criticism is, is a more thorough and thoughtful and open-minded engagement with our own experience, beginning — and particularly in this book — with our experience of works of art and products of culture.

These things are very powerful and complicated and sometimes mysterious vessels of meaning and emotion and products of human intention, and we need to take them seriously. We need to take our own experiences and our own pleasures seriously. We need to learn, I think, to think outside our own prejudices and to open our minds and our senses to what the world has to offer.

And I guess what I think of criticism as really being is that kind of thinking, that approach to experience, that approach to life. It’s different from — because art is different from — politics or morality or religion or any of these other things. But it is one of the things, one of the modes of expression and experience, that fulfills our lives.

TM: And, at the same time, the book is very good about telling people how much they are already doing criticism in their everyday lives.

AOS: For me, criticism starts with the conversation that you have about your experience. So, it can be a conversation in your head, or a literal conversation with other people. But I always think for me, movie criticism, long before I was a professional movie critic, [was] the experience of going to a movie with your friends and then arguing about it in the coffee shop or the bar afterwards. Or, in less pleasant scenarios, getting in a huge fight with your date about what a good movie is about. [Laughs.] That’s criticism.

When we take things seriously and react to them and think about what happened to us: Why do you love this song? Why do you play it over and over and over again? How are these things so meaningful to us? When you binge-watch a certain television show and you can’t stop thinking about it and talking about it and you go online and read the recaps. Or you go on Facebook with your friends and try to hash out, “What did that episode mean?” “What happened?” Or the kind of cliché of the “water cooler conversation.” That’s criticism. We’re doing it. It’s kind of wired into us. Something happens — we see something, we feel something — we want to make sense about it. We want to talk about it.

TM: In a recent Times piece that’s adapted from the book, you wrote, “The days of the all-powerful critic are over.” But, you still must have a pretty significant amount of power, as one of the lead critics in The Times. How much power do you feel you have? And, if at all, does that affect the way you go about doing your job?

AOS: I try not to think about it as I go about my job. I think it would be really paralyzing and it would kind of make me a bad person if I thought about that. You know, “I’m the mighty critic of The New York Times. I’m going to make you or break you, you little movie.” I have the good fortune and the luxury to be able to do most of my writing at home. So I can kind of pretend that this mighty institution —

TM: You mean you don’t have an office in the top floor of The New York Times skyscraper?

AOS: No. I have a little cubicle on the fourth floor. Which is basically where there are piles of books and DVDs. But I mostly am working from home in Brooklyn, so I can pretend I’m just like every other writer in Brooklyn, sitting with my laptop, either at home or in the coffee shop.

But I like to think that the power of critics is like the power of any other writer. It’s, finally, the power of persuasion. I might have influence to the extent that what I write can make sense to people and can make a strong argument and persuade them, at least, of the value of what I’m saying, of the complete truth of it. And I think where that influence, let’s say, comes from is the idea that a critic is an independent and honest voice in the culture.

Which doesn’t mean [a critic is] always right. I’m only one person doing my best to make sense of things and, to a very large extent, what I’m writing comes out of my own subjective experience, and my own views, and maybe my own biases, and my own history. But I’m trying to turn that into something, into some writing that people can find useful and that also is not — and I think this is very important and this is why criticism does matter in the world we live in now — that it’s not part of the machinery of advertising and publicity and marketing. That it’s independent.

Movie studios are able to flood the media with all kinds of publicity and promotion and marketing and advertising, including some that happens kind of under the guise of journalism. They can get lots of soft, appreciative features and profiles. And they can send the stars out onto the talk shows and stuff and create a climate of reception for these movies. And it’s important to have voices in the mix that can be heard that are speaking independently and truthfully about that.

Going back to Roger Ebert, the great appeal of that show, one of the ways that it lasted as long as it did, was that it was a place where people could go to hear two guys speaking their mind, speaking honestly and without compromise about movies.

TM: You talk in the book about a critic who “had seen too many movies.” Surely you’ve seen an extraordinary number of movies. How do you avoid that ailment?

AOS: I think the movies help a lot. The fact that there are so many of them and there’s such a variety and there are so many different kinds. And sometimes I can choose my assignments in a way that will refresh my sense of what the movies have to offer. For example, this year, after November and December and the Oscar movies, I was sort of exhausted and I was a little tapped-out with Hollywood movies, although I liked a lot of them. And so in the first month of the year, I was lucky enough to be able to review — I think in the month of January I reviewed only foreign-language films.

And it wasn’t that I loved all of them. Some of them I really liked; some of them were a little disappointing or flawed in some way. But they were different. They gave me another kind of filmmaking to think about. Different aesthetic questions…different kinds of stories. They came from different places. And the movies offer that variety. In a given week, I will review a documentary, a big blockbuster, a low-budget horror movie, a movie from Iceland or Mexico or China. So that keeps it very fresh and I’ve always thought that, the point at which I get tired, the point at which I get jaded, the point at which I start to think that’s it’s all been done, that all of the great or interesting movies are in the past, that’s when I should stop and get out of the way and let someone else do it.

You don’t necessarily have to be a starry-eyed Pollyanna. But it’s important to keep faith in the art form. To not get cynical. To not get jaded. To not get nostalgic. And sometime, when I take vacations, I have to just not see any movies. [Laughs.] You know, go sit on an island off the coast of Maine and look at the water for a week.

AOS: It has happened. And it’s definitely a challenging time to embark on any kind of writing career or journalistic career. Although I think that things are maybe looking a little better than they were, say, four or five years ago when it just seemed like it was all bottoming out. But one thing is: people like to be sort of gloomy and nostalgic, but it’s never been — it’s not like any guidance counselor would ever have pointed a young person in a direction and said, “Oh yeah, film criticism. That’s the ticket. That’s the way to go.” It’s always been an uphill climb.

But I think that there are way more entry points and fewer barriers to entry than there used to be to getting your work out there, to getting your voice heard. There may also be fewer ways to get paid. And that’s kind of always the paradox of the Internet: you have this access, but how to monetize your content, as they say, is always the challenge.

But I have one example of a student of mine, from the first year I taught the course at Wesleyan. A brilliant student who followed a lot of critics and writers on Twitter and would get in these conversations and had these really smart things to say in 140 characters. And at a certain point, one of the people she was following and talking with about movies and TV was an editor at The Daily Beast who got in touch with her and said, “Hey, you want to write something?” And she’s been writing for that and for other outlets for a while now. I didn’t advise her [on any of that]; I can take no credit at all.

TM: It’s a modern-day Cinderella story.

AOS: It sort of is a modern Cinderella story. And the lesson is not about how to make a Twitter profile. But it was encouraging to me, because I thought, “If you have something to say, and you’re smart, and right, you can find ways to knock at the doors and to get noticed.” I mean, it doesn’t work all the time. It’s hard. There can be a long period of frustration, of not getting noticed or of having to kind of struggle to find an outlet. But in a way that’s no different.

I can remember when I was starting out, I was writing book criticism instead of film criticism. But I had one clip and I sent it out to like 60 different people and I heard nothing. But then I eventually heard from someone and got another assignment and another clip [and] slowly, slowly, slowly built something. But even then I remember talking to one editor I’d been writing for, when I was just kind of starting to get a taste for writing criticism in magazines and newspapers and stuff. And he said, “Well, you know, it’s impossible to make a living.” So that’s always been true. And yet people do.

TM: For people out there who are skeptical that criticism is an art form, in and of itself, how would you try to persuade them?

Allegheny Front is a severe book. It’s a book that doesn’t trouble itself to protect the reader. “An animal has just enough brains to cure its own hide,” muses a man who is pages away from having just enough brains to see his own hide opened by a shotgun blast. In this collection of stories, his second book after the novel Honey from the Lion, Matthew Neill Null gives us a near-journalistic depiction of the violence men have wrought on nature and on themselves. But Null is shifty, prone to sliding into a different kind of honesty, a shelter-in-the-storm tenderness made all the more seductive due to its relative scarcity in the collection. Null is from West Virginia, and most of the literary press surrounding Null’s work lays the West Virginia on pretty thick — this interview is no exception. The insistence on the West Virginia narrative is not without good reason, though; Null is in possession of a ranging, encyclopedic knowledge of the Mountain State that is every bit as deep as it is wide. Over the course of a few emails, I had the pleasure of speaking with Null about a variety of topics from the efficacy of spoken stories to the forgotten work of Wendy Brenner.

The Millions: West Virginia is all over your work. In Lydia Millet’s introduction to this collection, she admits to knowing “almost as little of hardscrabble country life in West Virginia as it’s possible to know.” I know about the Wild and Wonderful Whites and prescription pills. I’ve heard the lazy, ridiculous incest jokes since I was a kid. I suspect most of your readers will be bringing a similar patchwork of misinformation regarding West Virginia to the table — do you see Allegheny Front and Honey from the Lion as an attempt to complicate — or at least augment — this bizarrely pervasive cultural perception in any way?

Matthew Neill Null: There are so many different people in a place like West Virginia, but we bear down on the most lurid aspects. The pill-eaters certainly exist — some are my pals! — but this vision leaves out the county surveyor, the deacon, the forester, the nurse raising kids on her own. But the world has certain expectations, and you’ll never go broke on stereotype. Writers like Daniel Woodrell have parleyed this into good, long careers. I think of it as meth-lab trailer porn.

I give a fuller spectrum of life because that is my experience of the place; my family has lived there for generations, since a time before the United States existed. My mom, who came from a modest background to say the least (her toy was an empty guitar case, and the house had no indoor plumbing), went to nursing school and climbed the ladder. My dad was a lawyer, from a family that has risen and fallen and risen again. One grandfather was a union pipefitter, the other a mechanic for Columbia Gas — though his father had been a state senator. I was blessed because we had friends from the entire expanse. It was a small place. Everyone was necessary. This is rare, I now know. We are stratified on the level of class. You walk into a party and find out everyone went to Bard together.

TM: In an interview with American Short Fiction, you bring up Breece Pancake as being generally accepted as the best writer to have come out of West Virginia. You go on to say that with Allegheny Front you wanted to “do something different, because if you’re a writer from West Virginia, particularly a white male, you’ll be compared to [Pancake].” It’s strange to imagine writing in the shadow of a 26-year-old man who died some 30-plus years ago whose name still might not ring a bell with many readers. Is this indicative of a shortage of West Virginia literature in general? Or is it just not getting the attention it deserves? Are there West Virginia writers we are woefully unaware of?

MNN: Oh man, I’m not the best person to ask. I’ve consciously avoided writers from my territory, because I wanted to engage the place totally, with my own language, own vision. I’m sure there are woefully overlooked writers of skill, as there are everywhere. My favorite West Virginia books are Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips and Lord of Misrule by my pal Jaimy Gordon, as well as Muriel Rukeyser’sU.S. 1, with its long section on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster.

If people have encountered any writing from West Virginia, it’s likely The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, which has had a cult revival, thanks to many champions such as John Casey, Andre Dubus III, and Kurt Vonnegut. In my grad program, people were obsessed with it.

Pancake killed himself at 26 in a bizarre episode, so his slender oeuvre is frozen like a fly in amber. Certainly the book of a troubled young man, confused, hurt, haunted by the land and history and class, still coming to terms with women and rejection. I wanted a more expansive world. We prize the human perspective too much. I mean my book to be a corrective to a certain understandable chauvinism.

TM: In “The Slow Lean of Time,” one of the characters dies and another is reassured by the fact that the drowned man “would live on on their tongues, not forever, but for a while, the nearest thing to forever.” Your stories often flirt with this collision of past and future, of old ways which eventually must submit to new. In “The Second District,” one of the hunters (who, rather primitively, has just used a dog to cave a bear) is prideful of owning “the first phone I encountered that could take pictures.” My question is this: why are these “stories that live on the tongue” still so vital when we live in a world where everyone has a phone that takes a picture?

MNN: If you look at social media, you see this leveling of American culture. Everyone has the same photo of the same beach, the same blue water, same wedding party, same slang, same songs, same movies. We have one lingua franca. We curate ourselves for mass consumption. But real speech, in the moment, in groups of two or three, tears at the veil. What we say that is not recorded. Drunken confession. Botched jokes. The rejected advance. Campfire at a deer camp. The novel as village gossip. The writer must rescue the whispered and the regrettable. I’m from a place totally shaped by talk, by verbal facility. All that silence, space, and privation gave people that gift, like the Irish, like Southerners. It was our currency, in lieu of any other. If you went to buy cigarettes, you weren’t getting out of there without a 20-minute conversation with the cashier and a couple sheep jokes.

The uneasy relationship between a past and an uncertain future is the major pivot of my work. It is impossible to shear my family’s identity from the West Virginia landscape. But I came of age at a time that was hyper-conscious of the fact that the place was dying. Free land brought us; we were broken on the rock of global capitalism. My world is gone, but we lived rich, particular lives there.

The fiction I’m writing now has a new focus: how to live in a world where there is no future. I find myself going back to beloved writers from Eastern Europe under communist regimes: Tadeusz Konwicki, György Konrád, Danilo Kiš. In absence of hope, their gaze is forced backwards. This may be a dead road, but I’m looking for a hint.

TM: I have to ask about the dedication. Your first book, Honey from the Lion, was dedicated, “For the land and the people.” The dedication in this book, however, reads, “For the animals.” At one point during my reading, I joked with myself that I might reread the collection to tally up how many gruesome (or at least very fully realized) animal deaths I came across. Animals — human and otherwise — are not treated particularly well in this collection that dedicates itself to them. What gives?

MNN: Interactions between humans and animals fascinate me. People in West Virginia live close to the bone — I hunted and fished for the table, like most. But if you look at the greatest swath of contemporary America, people encounter animals bloodlessly shrink-wrapped in the grocery aisle, or they keep pets and fetishize them. (I say this as a dog-lover. You take a young thing from its natural mother, inflict Stockholm Syndrome on it, and convince yourself that this is true love.) So I wanted interactions that are not filtered through sentiment or the factory slaughter-house. Force the issue. As Joy Williams says, “Good writing never soothes or comforts.” Look hard at the brutality people inflict on the landscape, the animals, and one another.

I’m from a place with a thin population. Animals filled out my world. In bed at night, I would wonder what the deer were doing up on the ridge. How the trout lived under the ice. So it was important for me to have a story like “Natural Resources” that is partly told from the perspective of animals. For me, the land, humans, and other forms of life are equally balanced; my work explores what happens when the balance is nudged, be it by capriciousness, bureaucracy, or extractive industry.

The poet Rebecca Gayle Howell is from eastern Kentucky, from a farm family, so we became fast friends. In her collection Render / An Apocalypse, she has poems like, “How to Kill a Rooster,” “How to Kill a Hen.” We’ve both noticed that, at our readings, no one objects to the violence that people do to each other, or that people do to the landscape, but sometimes a person will flip over the death of an animal. I’m not sure what this means. I’m still thinking on it. Perhaps because we project an innocence upon animals — they cannot speak, like very young children. But then, I’ve seen a mink kill a hen and not bother to eat it. It killed for play or for spite.

When I was rattling around for my novel, sometimes I would read a passage set on this howling winter mountainside — a lion attacks a team of horses, a teamster is mortally hurt, a horse has its foot sheared off when a log pins it against a stump. I worried to Rebecca about that, and she said, “You must get comfortable with discomfort.” With inflicting discomfort. That’s the difference between art and wallpaper.

TM: “Unsentimental” is a word I’ve seen stamped all over reviews of your work, usually always intended as complimentary; for whatever reason, “sentiment” has become a pejorative. That said, one of the stories from this collection, “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River,” elicited more of an emotional response from me than anything I’ve read recently. I think perhaps my reaction had something to do with the relative lack of obviously emotional points of reference in your work — a sort of supply/demand relationship. Is this a balance you’re conscious of striking or is it something that happens on its own?

MNN: In “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River,” I wanted to summon that sharp, bone-deep desire most of us feel toward someone when we’re young — it’s so immediate and annihilating there’s no way to resist. Well, okay, we feel it when we’re older, too, but if fate has blessed us with wisdom, we manage it better. (I’ve not been blessed.)

My tendency is to withhold emotion for as long as possible, then release it at certain, charged moments. I noticed this early on as a symptom of my writing, then began to use it more consciously as a tactic. That said, now that I’ve written two books, I want to tear down my practice and find a new syntax. I’m a couple hundred pages into a novel, part of which follows the dissolution of a long and disastrous marriage, so the exploration of the characters’ interior emotional landscape must be more a part of it. But even then, I don’t think I’m capable of going too far in the other direction. Sentimentality (not sentiment) is the enemy and the destroyer. Evan S. Connell is impressive in Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. A master of restraint. Even if the characters cannot articulate it to themselves, you always know what they feel. Connell is the forgotten American stylist of the 20th century. Such an elegant writer. His nonfiction works are just as startling, if not more so.

TM: You’re something of a compendium of “writers I should have heard of by now.” Who else should I be embarrassed not to know about?

MNN: Wendy Brenner is a fabulously talented short story and essay writer. She hits a sweet spot between Joy Williams and Padgett Powell, though she has a voice all her own, often more poignant. Begin with her essays for the Oxford American, specifically “Love and Death in the Cape Fear Serpentarium” and “Strange Beads,” then read her story collection Large Animals in Everyday Life.

Paula Nangle’s woefully-overlooked novel The Leper Compound follows a young girl into adulthood as Rhodesia is becoming Zimbabwe. A poet’s novel, in a way. I’ve met precisely one other human being who has read it.

Sybille Bedford’sA Legacy is a moving dream. I don’t even want to talk about it.

Malcolm Braly’sOn the Yard is a prison novel, written while the author was incarcerated in San Quentin. But this isn’t the rough diamond you expect from prison lit. This novel is technically flawless. His memoir False Starts is out-of-print, once again proving the world is unjust.

TM: You’ve mentioned a world where there is no future, Eastern European communist regimes, and intentionally inflicting discomfort — this “dissolution of a marriage” novel is shaping up to be a real hoot! I’m having a difficult time imagining your work taking place under a roof. Are we still in West Virginia? Can you spill the beans?

MNN: In The Rumpus, the reviewer Micah Stack actually counted up what percentage of Allegheny Front takes place inside — he said it was less than two percent! I love it.

I don’t want to lift the lid off the pot, but the next novel takes place in the early-1960s, mostly in West Virginia but with interludes elsewhere. It traces political corruption, the rise and fall of the Great Society, and the tension between Marxists and anti-communist liberals in the American labor movement. The story of rural life is thought to be incoherent. It is not. Global political forces shape the private lives and social crises of characters who live in distant, even isolated areas, seemingly far from the main stage of history and the centers of power, commerce, and media. Susan Howe displays this to great effect in My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-Mark.

TM: I noticed a conspicuous lack of mining throughout this collection. It’s almost always there, but you keep it out of the foreground. Was this a deliberate move to avoid another of those tired West Virginia tropes, or is that just one more of the ways in which the state has been misrepresented?

MNN: My friend Phyllis says that the quintessential West Virginia story features a laid-off coal miner whose wife has just left him. He broodily gets whiskey-drunk (okay, meth-addled if the story was written in the last decade), goes deer-hunting (preferably with his dead father’s rifle), and accidentally shoots his beloved hound dog. The trailer door slams. He is now truly and forever alone.

But more seriously, yes, I wanted it to be in the background, always there, pervasive but rarely noticed, dark clouds on the horizon. In my novel, in their difficult moments the male characters always think of going into the mines. “If my life doesn’t pan out, I can always do this.” They think of it wistfully, as one thinks of suicide.

After I sold my novel to Little, Brown, my editor Allie Sommer and I talked on the phone (for the second time ever). I said, "My parents are so proud of me!" and she said something like, "Mine are so proud of me!"

Whenever my students ask me about getting a literary agent, I say three things: 1. There are a lot of agents out there. 2. The process can take a long time, so be prepared for rejection and waiting, waiting, waiting. 3. If you’re afraid of your agent, he or she is not the right agent for you. That last piece of advice is borne out of my experience working with Erin Hosier, whom I consider not only my advocate and colleague, but my friend. I’m not afraid to email her for advice and I do not fear her reaction to my work. (Other friends of mine seem cowed by their agents, which saddens me: if your agent can’t root for you, then who in the business can?) Erin is honest and smart and funny, and if I am bugging her too much I expect her to tell me so. When she isn’t agenting at Dunow, Carlson and Lerner, she’s writing. Her memoir, D0n’t Let Me Down, is forthcoming from Atria Books. Also: her lipstick is always impeccable.

She answered the following questions via email within 24-hours. If you want to hear more from Erin — and who won’t after reading this? — she’ll be appearing at WWLA: The Conference on Saturday, June 28, 2014. (And, yes, that’s a shameless plug.)

The Millions: How did you become a literary agent?

Erin Hosier: I had been interning at a magazine and found it to be a stressful, low-paying job with a lot of responsibility, but I loved the editorial meetings. I loved talking about ideas and strategizing with smart people. It was thrilling to help put together an issue of a magazine, and see the fruits of our labor on display just three months later. The people there were always bummed out, though. They moved so quickly through an idea when I wanted to immerse myself in one. I happened to read a galley of a book called The Forest For The Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, that made book publishing sound much more my speed. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was introduced to the book’s author, Betsy Lerner, who then hired me to be her assistant when she made the switch from Doubleday editor to literary agent at The Gernert Co. The whole thing happened very quickly, in the time it would have taken for another issue of the magazine to come out. I answered phones and worked really hard for a year before I ever sold a book, but once I showed the aptitude, I was given a lot of support and encouragement to move forward in my career. There was nothing corporate about that agency (credit wendy at dresshead.com). I didn’t have to compete with anyone or fill a quota. I’ll always be grateful for that experience, but my publishing soulmate will always be Betsy Lerner, who I’ll follow to the ends of the earth.

TM: Can you describe, in 2-3 sentences, why a writer needs an agent?

EH: It’s like having a lawyer, but way cheaper. You wouldn’t represent yourself at your own trial, would you? A good literary agent protects you from yourself.

TM: What does an agent do all day? How much reading does the job entail? How many schmooze lunches do you have a week? How often do you have to call an editor and yell at them?

EH: I’m sure some agents read all night and on the weekends. To me, that isn’t pleasurable — that’s being a full-time editor, and that’s where I have to draw the line, when it becomes a quality of life issue. At this point, I only take on authors or projects when I feel like I’m the only one who can do the manuscript in front of me justice. I have to be able to envision the book as a finished product/physical object before I can even consider it. Then I have to really believe that the author and I would be compatible collaborators.

Back in the day, I was willing to work with people with obvious personality disorders if it meant I’d make more money or get to go to better parties. But now that I’m older I have zero tolerance. I mention this because one learns over time that it’s not so much the lunches and the meetings, or the dealmaking and negotiating, as it is the day-to-day relationships with the writers themselves. Some of the people I work with are pure artists, some are in it to add prestige to their platforms, some are ghostwriting manuscripts for cash, some are just learning how to write and need total editorial attention, all need the money yesterday, and all are vulnerable to self-loathing in the face of criticism or apathy in a dying industry. For me, it’s the emotional work mixed with the variety of potential crises that makes this job one I take too seriously to do too much.

I write and do other things myself now to balance it out. But since you asked, here’s a typical scenario. If I don’t have an AM meeting, I will stay up late either writing or thinking about writing (or watching HBO Go), then get up after rush hour and contemplate email. Inevitably, there will be at least one immediate crisis involving an author or a book that needs addressing. Pep talks are a big part of my outgoing email, ditto rejections and referrals, favors and solicitations, and the transference of information between publishers, agents, publicists, and authors. I try not to book more than three lunches with editors a week. They start to blend together if you do too many, so I really prefer one. I like getting to know people though, and the publisher pays for the sushi, so I can’t complain.

I go to a variety of meetings a week, not just with writers, but with publishers, talent agents, foreign rights agents, lawyers, managers, and colleagues. I don’t necessarily have to go to the office if I don’t have any meetings onsite, so increasingly I work from home. Either way, I try to work for my clients during the day, and more for myself at night. As for reading, same thing: for the writers during the day, for me at night. Both reading and writing tend to make me sleepy, so that’s become my test – can I read or write this paragraph without wanting to put my head on the desk? I do go to events sometimes, but not as much as I used to – and more to support than to schmooze.

TM: How do you recommend aspiring writers find agents?

EH: I’m easy to find. Just treat me like you would any celebrity, because that’s sometimes what it feels like for an agent to go to a party. I once dated a writer for months before I found out he was trying to sleep his way to representation. I get it, it’s nice to meet me. In general, I’d recommend cutting to the chase. I’ve had good luck with new writers lately — no mouth breathers in the bunch at The New School’s MFA program — I met some in person on campus, listened to the ones that approached me, invited them to send pages if I thought it was something I’d be interested in, and did/am doing my best to follow up on each one.

It’s rare that I try to go out there and find new clients — they have to come to me. This is almost always done by referral from another writer, editor or colleague. I do look at slush email but only if the queries are short and exciting to me. If they are, you’ll hear one way or the other. If they’re not, I usually just delete. It sounds shitty, but if you were one of my clients you wouldn’t want me wasting time on email from strangers who might take attention away from the important work we’ve got to do together. It’s so not personal. The great thing about literary agents is there are a ton of them.

TM: You took me on as a client years before I actually made you any money. Before Little, Brown bought California, I was pretty sure you were nuts for working with me. What makes you want to take on a writer? And do you feel like you have a spidey-sense for books that will make money — or (in the case of my first book), not?

EH: I actually advised you to try another agent specifically known for selling edgy debut fiction, but you were really stubborn! Here’s what I think happened: you were referred somehow or I found out you went to Iowa. I read that manuscript that you sent and I knew the subject matter was risky (the psycho-sexual coming of age of a very young teenage girl, with a dual historical narrative about the nature of violence against, and perpetuated by, women) – the novel equivalent of a Harmony Korine movie – but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew it was ahead of its time. (It still is.) I knew I had to try because even though the other agent might have taken you on, I couldn’t be sure that s/he would get you the same way I do. When I met you in person at the Le Pain Quotidien in Beverly Hills, I was prepared to tell you my doubts, but you were so pretty and serious that it actually surprised me that something that dark could come from someone so fair. I felt like you could handle the ride, and if you wanted to put your trust in me then I would be proud to stick up for a novel that upset people, and scared them.

I do think I have spidey-sense, yes, but it doesn’t often do any good in publishing. One of my favorite writers whose book I couldn’t sell (because the world wasn’t ready) two years later ended up writing on Girls. Now she’s rich and successful and I’ll be forever asking her for blurbs and referrals. Meanwhile I’m the one who was telling them about so-and-so five years before the boss’s daughter got her first period, which counts for nothing when a publisher insists on waiting on Hollywood or the public to legitimize my hunch. My failure to convince publishers of someone’s talent and commercial viability: that’s a sustained shitty feeling that comes with no billable hours.

TM: Once you told me something like, “Publishers like things tied up in pretty pink bows” and you said that it was harder for a woman writing dark fiction to get published. Do you still think this is true? And, if so, any guesses as to why this might be the case, especially since so many women work in publishing?

EH: I don’t think it’s the women who work in publishing as much as it is this notion of what readers (mostly women) want. There are a couple of things going on. I think women in our culture can speak freely about dark themes on the page more and more if they’re comedians, or writing narrative nonfiction that directly addresses a personal crisis that happened to them. In fiction, a great writer can get inside the heads of a range of characters, so they can explore the interior motivations of a person who does bad things, even if that person is female. I’m talking specifically about violence, explicit sexual content, and “non-sympathetic” characters. There’s still this notion that women have to deliver a happy ending/redemption in order to have the opportunity to sell. And I’ve personally received a note that women should use words like “fuck” less on the page, lest they alienate their audience. I’ve been told in a meeting, in reference to a book by a sex-worker-by-choice – “Who would want to read a book by a whore?” (Granted, this was said by a publisher from another country, but he was European and this was less than 10 years ago.) I know of one fiction writer who wrote a masterful novel about a mother who kills her child. She felt she had to give herself a gender neutral pseudonym to even submit it to publishers. (Still didn’t sell, but I still think about that novel to this day.)

Ironically, one area where this is changing is in books for young adults. Before The Hunger Games became a sensation, do you think a Hollywood studio would have green-lit a project about children hunting and killing each other for sport? The Lovely Bones – a novel narrated by a young girl who has been raped and murdered – that was excerpted in Seventeen when it was published, not Playboy, not the New Yorker. I’m heartened by this because publishers are starting to understand that it doesn’t get darker than being a teenage girl, and we need books that help us relate and cope with the stuff that is happening to us/around us for the first time. These YA books are now crossing over into the adult market, as opposed to the other way around. Young women have always been big consumers of literature – it’s about time publishers listen to the stories they want told.

TM: You’re not only an agent, but a writer, with a forthcoming memoir. How has your view of your job changed now that you’ve experienced it from an author’s point of view?

EH: I was really arrogant about being able to write a good, saleable book proposal, and I knew that I had an interesting personal story to tell. I also had the best agent for me (Lerner), who I was close to and who had confidence in my abilities. I had this idea that I just needed a chunk of money that an advance could bring to actually “buy me some time” to write the memoir I assumed would just burst forth from my hands as efficiently as my editorial letters to/for the people I represent. The proposal did sell in an efficient manner, and I was given the customary 12 months to produce a draft. Guess what? That was in 2011.

Right after I got the book deal, I was asked to sit on a panel about art vs. commerce in publishing. I remember I said something really stupid like, “I only write to get paid” or “For me, it’s about the money.” And I believe it was Fiona Maazel who piped up and said that was a bullshit way to approach a writing project. The thing she said that stuck with me was, “The writing is its own reward.” At the time I couldn’t imagine it. How could the writing – especially if no one gets to read it – be its own reward? And now I see exactly what she meant. Writing this book has already changed me forever, and it still doesn’t have a pub date.

I know first-hand now, that a book is constantly being written, rewritten, thrown across the room in anger, shelved for awhile, and changed ad nauseum until someone finally accepts it as being “finished.” (And that’s just the first part of the process.) I no longer ask another writer when their next book is coming out because I know what anxiety that induces. I would never shame an author who was having a hard time with a delivery date. I now believe the up-front money is irrelevant in the long run, (because taxes), but also because you’re doing something so difficult that almost no amount of money will make you feel better about the actual process of writing/getting published. Writing can either save you or ruin your life – the jury’s still out on what that will mean for me. And I don’t mind warning authors now: don’t ever do it for the money. I’m poorer now than I’ve ever been, but I think I’m a better agent, and a better person, because of it.

One of the more heartening news stories of the past couple of weeks must have been the tale ofHideaki Akaiwa. The 43-year-old Japanese man, upon finding himself separated from his family by the recent tsunami, put on scuba gear and plunged into the waters to find and rescue his wife, his mother, and a bevy of trapped strangers. Part of the appeal of the story, surely, had to do with its demonstration of human ingenuity triumphing over natural forces. But, of course, humans often can’t outwit nature, and eventually death comes for us all.

In Alexi Zentner’s debut novel Touch, as in life, nature is impersonal and brutish, as unpredictable as it is beautiful. Taking place in turn-of-the-century northern Canada in a small frontier logging town, this luminous novel tells the story of a pastor who, in returning home to his dying mother, has to confront the mysteries and ghosts of his childhood, and so of the woods. I first came across Zentner’s work in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection; his fiction has also appeared in the Atlantic, Tin House, Narrative, Orion, Slice, and elsewhere. J. Robert Lennon calls Touch “a sublime haunting,” and Téa Obreht says the novel is “stunning and provocative.”

Zentner and I first met as fellow work-study scholars at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; more recently, we met to talk about Touch, monsters, the wild, ambition, and the upsides of making his wife cry.

The Millions: Reading your book about the natural perils of life in a frontier town while also reading about the tsunami in Japan felt a little like reading about the fall of Rome anytime in the past ten years or so: the dangers of long ago kept reminding me of present-day disasters. While writing Touch, were you at all influenced by present-day environmental or natural-hazard concerns?

Alexi Zentner: If you keep up with the news, it’s hard not to be influenced by those concerns, but I think the bigger pressures for me were closer to home. I used to rock climb —avidly, though not very well— and do enough outdoor activities that I’m aware of how much of a role both preparation and luck can play in survival. What probably brought the hazards of the natural world more to the forefront, however, was simply having children. It’s amazing how dangerous the world can suddenly look when you’ve got a little kid running around. There are a lot of sharp corners and hard surfaces in life.

TM: Can we talk about the monsters? There’s an array of supernatural monsters and other magical beings in your novel, all of whom lurk in the wild. Just to name a few, there are the qallupilluit: sea witches who smell like rotting meat, the wehtiko: men-cum-cannibals who are always hungry, and the mahaha: creatures who tickle you until you die. What informed your choice to incorporate magic and otherworldly creatures into the natural world of your novel?

AZ: I was interested in how, in North America, we once had a frontier. We had myths and monsters in the United States with Bigfoot, that sort of creature, and in Canada we had Inuit legends that I’ve appropriated. So, I picked and chose. The qallupilluit is a classic Inuit story of witches that call you down to the ice, formerly used as a way to keep children away from unsafe ice. It’s a cautionary tale: the monsters stand in for the ways in which nature can unpredictable. Today, when you go into a natural environment, you’ve got your Gore-Tex jacket and your GPS, but a hundred years ago, the place where Sawgamet is set is an uncharted wilderness.

One of the characters, Jeannot, is the first white man there, so when he hears legends about these myths and monsters, he can’t really say that they’re not true. In the vastness of the woods, it’s not really clear what is or is not in there. In the book, they’re not illusions. And the wehtiko—that’s a cannibal myth. When you live in these harsh climates, cannibalism happens. Again, the myths are a way of enforcing the taboo.

TM: How did you first come across these legends?

AZ: The qallupilluit comes from a children’s book by Robert Munsch. In the children’s book, the story is less scary, of course: it’s a book that I’ve read to my kids. At the back of the book there’s a bit about how a little girl in the village told him the story, so I looked it up, and of course I bastardized it to my own ends, in the same way any person who comes into a culture and tries to take away its myths bastardizes it. This is what I’ve done with Jeannot, and what the characters of the book have done. In the book, the monsters respond to that—they’ve been transformed by the settlers themselves. As the settlers transform the land, they also transform its myths.

TM: What interested you in the first place in the wilderness and the frontier?

AZ: The novel started with a simple image I had of a girl falling through the ice and getting frozen underneath. A town grew around that, then I thought of the father of this girl. Once I started writing him, his actions became preordained because he was the sort of man who would never be able to just watch his daughter die, the sort of man who had to act, and he didn’t have much choice in what he did when his daughter fell through the ice. He’s not a character who could have done anything other than what he did. There’s something about that logging landscape that allows you to distill characters to their essence, because there are so many times when it really is just them, and there’s nothing else to rely on.

TM: And so often, it’s not enough. I was moved by the tenuousness of loss in Touch: when people die, they’re not quite dead, or at least there’s the hope that they’re not entirely dead. Jeannot comes back to the town of Sawgamet to raise the dead—in this case to raise his wife, whom he’d lost a long time ago—and Jeannot tells his grandson Stephen that if he would just believe, he, too, could find all his dead. Is there something specific about Sawgamet and the frontier that creates this tenuousness, or is it specific to Stephen and his family?

AZ: In many ways, the family pays for the sins of the father and the grandfather. Jeannot was the first one to sully the wilderness, so the wilderness strikes back at him: people are trying to claw civilization from the wilderness and the wilderness is trying to claw it back. I think that’s why death doesn’t seem entirely final. In the vastness of the landscape, there’s a sense that there may be things greater than God. If you live in a place where there really are monsters and witches, it seems easy to believe that the flip side could be true. Jeannot was trained to be a priest and left the ministry as a young man, and Stephen, the narrator, is a priest. For them, part and parcel with this belief of monsters comes the possibility of glorious things.

TM: Yes, glorious things. There’s more that’s supernatural in Touch than the monsters. There are also golden caribou, a singing dog, and strange intrusions of the past into the present, and vice versa.

AZ: With what I’m writing, I call it mythical realism instead of magical realism, because magical realism is so heavily identified with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Latin America. I think what I’m doing takes that same sense of magic, but I’m writing in a distinctively North American style, which is not done. I think what people have done is that they’ve taken magical realism and overlaid it on North America. I don’t think that’s the most successful strategy, so I was very interested in how I could do that in a way that was uniquely my own.

TM: I remember that on the first day I met you, at Bread Loaf, we had a late-night conversation in the barn about ambition: we confessed that we want our writing to compete with the greats, and that we want to add something of note to the literature we love. Donald Hall said, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” Can you say more about that ambition and how that affects your writing, particularly as a debut writer?

AZ: I think I’m more willing to fail. I don’t know whether or not my writing will stand the test of time, but that’s what I want to try and do. I want to try to write the kind of books that people will be reading generations from now, and that will change people’s lives. The kind of books that people read and press upon their friends, saying, You have to read this. But I think that to write that way you have to be willing to take chances in what you are doing, and that means that sometimes you can fail really badly. And I think it also means you have to be serious in your endeavors.

TM: Serious in what sense?

AZ: I don’t mean all you do is think about writing, but there are some sacrifices you make. Also, I think most writers would love to sell a lot of copies and win awards and do well, because people want to be successful. I understand that, but you can’t think about that while you’re writing. If you want to think about that when you’re done for the day, go for it. But while you’re actually writing, you have to do things because you believe they’re right. There have been times in my writing process when I’ve had a chorus of people say to me, “You need to make this change,” and I haven’t, because they were wrong and I was right. There have been other times when I’ve had to handle a chorus who’ve said to me, “This is brilliant, you shouldn’t change it, but I’ve heard one person say, “This isn’t working,” and I know that last voice is right. It’s a balancing act.

TM: In your comments in the PEN/O. Henry collection, you wrote that you knew you could become a writer when you showed the story to your wife and she read it, and started crying. Did you have a lot of doubt before that about whether or not you could write fiction? What about that moment was revelatory for you?

AZ: My poor wife. I was a stay-at-home father at that time and I was trying to write, so we hired a babysitter to come for two hours twice a week. My wife is a school psychologist making a teacher’s salary, so that extra $50 a week was an investment for us. Maybe a month into it, I wrote what ended up becoming the O. Henry story. I showed it to her and I went to do some errands around the house, then I came back 20 minutes later, and she was crying. I think my first response was, What’s wrong? And when she said it was just the story I thought, All right.

Early on, I was very scared about whether or not I was good enough. I’d been a writer for a very long time, but also, not really. The thing is, I had tried, but not very hard. Because if you don’t try very hard, and you fail, you don’t have to feel that badly about it. I think it’s terrifying when you say, “I’m really committed to this,” and you try your hardest and do your absolute best work. Then, if you fail, you don’t have anything to hide behind.

I have been fortunate in that I’ve had enough success with things that when things go poorly for me with my writing I’m able to look at outside successes to help them bolster my internal confidence. It helps that I’m an unnaturally cheery person.

TM: Does your wife continue to read your work?

AZ: Yes, and to this day, if my wife reads something and she cries, that usually means that I did something right. It’s funny—I can’t predict it. My wife is a very good reader, and she’s not a writer, and that’s a hugely helpful thing. She’s a canary in a coal mine, a great test for how well other people will respond to a piece.

When you give a piece to writers, you often get a very difference response from what the public response will be. If you’re a construction worker and you look at a house, you see the trusses and the framing, and the way it’s built; if you go to buy a house you think, oh, look at the kitchen, and there’s a walk-in closet. Similarly, when you’re a writer, you see the bones of a story: why things work and why they don’t, whereas when you’re a reader you think of why you liked it or didn’t like it.

TM: Yes. The reader thinks: I believed, I didn’t believe. I was moved by it, I wasn’t moved by it. I cared, I didn’t.

AZ: As a writer, you lose sight of that. You lose sight of the question, Do I like this book? When I teach, one of the things I say to a student is that the most important question is, Do I want to keep reading this? And if the answer is no, nothing else matters. I’ve read some novels that are stylistically brilliant, but I have no emotion about them. Then I’ve read some books and stories that are really flawed, but that really moved me and stayed with me, and, given a choice, I’d rather be that writer. I’d rather risk being overly sentimental than risk nothing.